By now you’ve most certainly read Marty Cagan’s article on Product teams vs Feature Teams. If you haven’t, you should as it paints a clear picture of the ideal state for digital product development teams. The short summary of Cagan’s definitions is that feature teams are told what to do and are measured on delivering output. They’re incentivized to ship products, have low levels of collaboration and almost no autonomy. Product teams, on the other hand, are empowered to solve problems, achieve outcomes and collaborate across disciplines effectively. You’ll recognize empowered product teams as the preferred model we described in Lean UX, Sense & Respond and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking (and countless blog posts and speeches). After more than two decades working in and with product teams I can confidently say that the empowered product team doesn’t stand a chance in the face of ego.
Humility is the oxygen for empowered product teams
Salvador Dali famously said, “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” Empowered product teams are the “perfect” we constantly chase in the hopes of one day becoming the ideal product development team. Inevitably teams and organizations struggle to put this model into place consistently causing frustration, blame and ultimately sub-optimal products and services. The teams working to help their customers are frustrated along the way knowing their work could have been better if it wasn’t for “this mandate” or “that last minute leadership change.” Yet, the people who suffer the most from this failed pursuit are the end users and customers. They actually do have problems that need to be solved and “let’s just add AI to it” isn’t going to solve that problem in most cases.
No amount of books, TED talks and LinkedIn posts are going to take ego out of the leadership equation. Empowered product teams fail because of a lack of trust. Leaders, egos buoyed by titles and salaries, believe they know best. Their teams are there to execute their vision and to do it predictably. The smart people they hired to do the work aren’t there to question or cast doubt on the vision. They’re certainly not there to change course once a commitment has been made – regardless of what the team has learned along the way. This isn’t limited to enterprise scale companies. Startup founders operate in a similar manner. After all, this is their baby. An empowered team threatens the viability of that initial idea (as it should). Humility is in short supply and without it empowered product teams struggle to survive.
Many years ago I joined a band called The Tony Roberts Band. If you’ve ever played music you know that a band can be the embodiment of an empowered team. It has all the qualities Cagan describes in his article – cross-functional collaboration, shared goal, managing to outcomes. In this new band, we were not an empowered team. It was clear from the name. There was one decision-maker and his name was Tony Roberts. When you join a band with a person’s name in it you have a clear sense of your role in that group. You’re an employee, not a collaborator. This kind of transparency is rare in product development. Every company touts their collaborative culture, transparency and customer focus. If they advertised the opposite, who would apply to work there?
Softening the executive ego
Legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi added a subtle variation to Dali’s quote. Lombardi said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” This approach feels realistic to me. Let’s chase the perfect – the empowered product team model so many of us promote. Along the way, let’s focus on the wins we rack up. Every step forward is a step in the right direction. Maybe we never spoke to customers before. Today we speak to 2 every quarter. That’s a win. It’s not perfect. It’s not even close to “empowered” but our customers get slightly better products because of it. We used to ship once a year. That gave us a yearly opportunity to learn. Now we ship every quarter. We’ve now quadrupled our learning opportunities.
Each process change can be measured in the impact it has on the product. When these changes improve the product everybody wins. Every win we collect is evidence we can use to get a step closer to empowered product teams on the next initiative. We can point to these earlier successes and implement them as the default. Step by step we improve our ways of working. Rather than getting wrapped up in other companies’ models we’re building our own. If we can connect these wins to the leadership team’s goals, trust increases. This is a virtuous cycle. The more trust leaders have in their product teams the more autonomous they’ll be. The more freedom they have the faster they’ll learn how to best serve their customers and achieve their business goals.
Evidence will overcome ego
In the same way we use evidence learned from in-market experimentation, we can justify the organizational design and cultural changes we want to make. Your CEO doesn’t have to believe Marty Cagan (or me or anyone else). However, if you can repeatedly prove that small changes in your team’s ways of working yield stronger product results you can expand the autonomy and empowerment of your team. Evidence will overcome some part of ego – not all of it – but in the process you and your teams will do better work and your customers will thank you for it.
